0NE OF THE ALL-TOO-FEW benefits of dying too soon—in fact, pretty squarely in her prime—was that Alicia Medill Patterson Guggenheim (who over the years, at odd moments, had given formal thought to such matters) pulled a big crowd for her funeral: not merely a church-full but a cathedral-full. On a bright, windy July morning, close to one thousand people pressed into the Episcopal cathedral in Garden City, Long Island (her choice)—still-stunned Newsday staff; family, friends and acquaintances; plus a fine showing of politicians, editors, and publishers. As per her wishes, the outside of the cathedral was arrayed with a colorful amplitude of flowers; inside there were thick layers of orange roses covering her coffin; a choir chanting psalms and lustily bellowing Protestant hymns, concluding with her favorite, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which left scarcely a dry eye in the house. Two months later, a second rite took place, this one orchestrated by Harry Guggenheim: a quiet, sad little assembly on the banks of the St. Mary’s, with her family gathered on the lawn beneath the great oak tree that stood (and still stands) between the house and the river, its branches heavy with Spanish moss, and under which her ashes were buried beneath a simple plaque, whose tender inscription (“A beautiful and spirited lady lived on this land, and under this oak tree she watched the river that she loved.”) had been composed by Harry, who seemed truly to miss his lively, quick-witted sparring partner now that she was gone.
AS TO ALICIA’S MASTER PLAN for the future of Newsday—a work in progress that consumed much time and energy as well as generating handsome legal fees (and which seemed to have at its core some varying degree of ownership sharing among Josephine’s children)—needless to say, her persistent and combative yearning for Harry’s crucial 2 percent had been predicated on the expectation of his dying first. Upon Alicia’s death, Harry took over as sole publisher, and also editor, and for seven years by general agreement continued to run Newsday as a successful and respected newspaper. To nobody’s surprise, he quickly got rid of Alan Hathway. But then in 1967 he surprised a good many people, possibly even himself, by turning over the job of publisher to young Bill Moyers, while staying on as editor in chief. Moyers was not only young but a Democrat; he had been a well-regarded press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson. But he was smart, astute, politically moderate, and personally appealing; sufficiently so for Guggenheim soon to regard him as “family” and even include him in his will. But as the Vietnam War split the country into opposing camps, Harry (more and more feeling his age and natural conservatism) came to view Moyers’s still-moderate-though-antiwar position as a betrayal, and fired him from both the paper and his will.
In 1970 Harry sold Newsday to the then-conservative Los Angeles Times-Mirror, under whose distant ownership it continued to flourish, extending itself into greater New York, first with a Queens edition, then a stand-alone Manhattan daily, New York Newsday. However, in 2000, as an early symptom of the challenges that newspapers would increasingly face in the Internet era, the Times-Mirror sold itself to the Chicago Tribune, with the result that for a few years Alicia Patterson’s little garage start-up became a subsidiary of the giant Midwestern monolith created by her ancestors, and which for generations had continued both to enrich and to devour them. Eventually even the once-mighty Tribune was forced to declare temporary bankruptcy, and in 2008 Newsday was purchased for $680 million by the cable television conglomerate Cablevision. Its current headquarters are still on Long Island in Melville, New York, about twenty miles from Garden City. At present writing, Newsday is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area, though its focus is back to Long Island. Its weekly circulation is the eleventh-highest in the country, the largest among suburban newspapers. Since its inception, Newsday has won twenty-two Pulitzer Prizes and has been a finalist in nineteen additional entries.